He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”
– The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

In The Book of Illusions, published in 2002, Paul Auster uses the words of the 19th century French memoirist Chateaubriand for the epigraph: “Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.” That’s also perhaps part of the reason why Man is “never quite still”. Think Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet or even Jay Gatsby of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel. That restlessness is even more pronounced as we try and make sense of a divided, and yet obviously indivisible world, in the wake of 9/11 — as the seven novels across genres, chosen at random, illustrate.

So, a grieving professor embarks on a journey to research a book on a silent comedian who has been presumed dead for 60 years. An immigrant from Bangladesh reaches out to her love outside marriage. A journalist arrives in a snow-bound city grappling with a suicide epidemic and ends up investigating East-West relations — and more. A neurosurgeon’s happiness bubble bursts. A Russian-Jew writer about to be sent to Auschwitz brilliantly captures Parisians in flight. In the wake of 9/11, a Princeton graduate, a Pakistani, is suddenly an outsider looking in. A girl must “mutate” to survive smog city. Seven stories, one tying theme: the protagonists are “never quite still”.
Take Auster’s The Book of Illusions. One character jumps in and out of roles — European Jew, Hollywood playboy — assuming new identities; the other, grieving for his dead wife and sons, travels far to find love, only to lose it.

In the Booker-shortlisted Brick Lane, Monica Ali brings Nazneen, 18, back from the dead-end of a life in Bangladesh by marrying her off to Chanu, twice her age, to live in London’s Tower Hamlets. Restless and yearning for home, she not only learns to live but to love and bear the consequences.
The consequences is what Orhan Pamuk’s poet-journalist hero Kerim, abbreviated to Ka, of Snow must face as he gets entangled with the lives of the melancholic people of a border town in Turkey. The people of Kars, a remote city, live a dual life, caught as they are between secularism and rising fundamentalism, democracy and the veil, poverty and unemployment. Pamuk, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2006, hints at what’s to be expected in the epigraphs, particularly the quotes from Stendhal (“Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.”) and Dostoevsky (“Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.”). As it turns out, the “ugly matters” make the people of Kars perpetually sad.

“Happiness,” spouts the neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, of Ian McEwan’s post 9/11 novel Saturday, “is a harder nut to crack”. The outside, not least a huge gathering of war protestors, will invade the inside and shatter the seemingly blissful marital bliss of the Perownes.
Invasion — that’s what shattered the lives of Irene Nemirovsky and her family of four as the Germans took control of Paris in 1940. Suite Francaise is an amazing story of struggle and survival — the novel itself remained hidden and unknown for 64 years till her daughter sent it to the printers. On July 3, 1942, Nemirovsky, the Russian-Jew writer who had made France her home but failed to get protection as Germans occupied Paris, jotted these words in her diary: “Just let it be over — one way or the other!” Days later, the French police were at her door and she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died within a month, leaving two daughters, one aged 10, the other 5.
But even as she was closer to death, she wrote the two books that form Suite Francaise, filling it with funny and deeply moving details of a people caught in flight, life in villages full of German soldiers where the locals had to learn to coexist with the enemy. But do we learn to coexist with the enemy? Can we share our home — and heart — with someone perceived to be one?

These are some of the questions Mohsin Hamid’s chiselled post 9/11 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, raises. It’s set at a café table in Lahore and the dramatic possibilities are endless as a bearded Pakistani man strikes up a conversation with an American stranger. The bias is clear but one is glued to this side of the story too — the circumstances that force Changez, a Princeton graduate, change what he thinks of America.

Like Changez, Kari, the eponymous protagonist of Amruta Patil’s debut graphic novel, is alienated in a city where she tries to breathe as little as she can to “prevent smog city from choking me”.
Sometimes, people don’t lose hope in the face of the harshest reality as Nemirovsky’s final letters home illlustrate: “… I shower my darling daughters with kisses…. If you can send me anything, I think my second pair of glasses are in the other suitcase…. Books please, and also if possible a bit of salted butter.” Then again, she scribbles in pencil: “My dearest love, my cherished children. I think we are leaving today. Courage and hope. May God help us all.” But no one helped Nemirovsky — and no one’s helping others still fighting bias and prejudice. Think of the restless world we live in today and the Nemirovsky story is still unfolding.